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Former CIA director
used Pentagon ties to introduce Iraqi defector
By Jonathan S.
Landay and Warren P. Strobel
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - A former CIA director who advocated war against
Saddam Hussein helped arrange the debriefing of an Iraqi defector
who falsely claimed that Iraq had biological-warfare laboratories
disguised as yogurt and milk trucks.
R. James Woolsey's role as a go-between was detailed in a
classified Defense Department report chronicling how the defector's
assertion came to be included in the Bush administration's case for
war even after the defector was determined to be a fabricator.
A senior U.S. official summarized portions of the report for
Knight Ridder on condition of anonymity because it's top secret. The
report said that on Feb. 11, 2002, Woolsey telephoned Deputy
Assistant Defense Secretary Linton Wells about the defector and told
him how to contact the man, who'd been produced by an Iraqi exile
group eager to oust Saddam. Wells said he passed the information to
the Defense Intelligence Agency.
_(CFR Member )Woolsey's previously undisclosed role in
the case of Maj. Mohammad Harith casts new light on how prominent
invasion advocates outside the government used their ties to senior
officials in the Bush administration to help make the case for war.
There's no indication that Woolsey was aware that Harith's
information was unreliable. (Oh?) Reconcile that with the
statement below about distrusting the exile group while Woolsey was
DCI.
By using his Pentagon contacts, Woolsey provided a direct
pipeline to the government for Harith's information that bypassed
the CIA, which for years had been highly
distrustful of the exile group that produced Harith.
The Senate Intelligence Committee didn't address that issue last
week in its 511-page report on Iraq intelligence.
The report largely blamed the CIA for hyping and misreading
intelligence that buttressed President Bush's charges that Saddam
had devastating weapons that he could use against the United States
or give to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.
Francis Brooke, Washington representative of the Iraqi National
Congress, the exile group that produced Harith and other defectors,
said intermediaries such as Woolsey and former
Pentagon official Richard Perle (CFR),
another leading war advocate, contacted the Bush administration
multiple times on the INC's behalf.
Such referrals were an efficient way to get potentially crucial
intelligence to the government, Brooke said. He stressed that the
INC made no claims about the defectors' veracity and it was up to
U.S. officials to decide whether to use their information.
The Senate Intelligence Committee assessed the Harith case and
found that intelligence analysts thought his claim was crucial in
appearing to corroborate allegations by another defector, code-named
Curve Ball, the main source of claims that Iraq had developed mobile
biological-weapons facilities to deceive U.N. weapons inspectors.
The allegation was one of the most dramatic made by Bush, Vice
President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and other
senior administration officials.
The Senate committee's report said Harith, whom it identified
only as an "INC source," was brought to the DIA's attention "by
Washington-based representatives of the INC in February 2002."
After several meetings, a DIA debriefer concluded that some of
Harith's information "seemed accurate, but much of it appeared
embellished" and he apparently "had been coached on what information
to provide."
Those findings weren't included in the initial DIA report on
Harith, which noted that he'd passed a lie detector test, the Senate
committee said.
However, further intelligence assessments in April, May and July
2002 questioned his credibility - including a "fabricator notice"
issued by the DIA. Nevertheless, Harith's claim was included in an
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate and cited by Bush in his
January 2003 State of the Union message.
There's no indication in the Senate Intelligence Committee report
why Bush and other top administration officials used Harith's
information after it was found by intelligence professionals to be
bogus.
No evidence of a mobile Iraqi biological-weapons program has been
found. Two truck trailers were found that appeared to match
defectors' descriptions, but U.S. intelligence analysts and other
experts remain divided over their purpose. Some think they were for
making hydrogen for weather balloons.
Woolsey is an influential Washington insider
who's on the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory group.
He served as CIA director from 1993 to 1995 and has close ties to
top administration officials by virtue of stints in senior defense
and diplomatic positions since the 1970s.
He's also close to the Iraqi National Congress, the former emigre
group led by Ahmad Chalabi, whom U.S. intelligence agencies now
suspect of passing highly classified American secrets to Iran.
Chalabi vehemently denies the charge.
American intelligence agencies have determined that information
on Iraqi weapons from defectors produced by the INC's Information
Collection Program, a multimillion-dollar U.S.-funded effort to
gather intelligence on Iraq, was marginal at best, and sometimes
fabricated or exaggerated. Intelligence officials also think that
the INC security official who handled the defectors was an Iranian
agent.
In 2000, Woolsey served briefly as a
corporate officer for the INC unit that handled U.S. funding, the
Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation. He and his former
law firm, Shea and Gardner, did pro bono work for the INC and Iraqi
exiles.
Chalabi, Brooke and other INC officials said they did their
utmost to assess defectors' claims before turning them over to U.S.
officials. They denied knowingly providing unreliable informants or
coaching them on what to say.
Typically, defectors are "walk-ins" who contact U.S. embassies
and undergo scrutiny for reliability. In other cases it takes
American intelligence professionals many months of painstaking work
to recruit defectors, and those efforts are begun only after the
potential value of the target's information is rigorously assessed.
Woolsey denied in a brief exchange with a Knight Ridder reporter
July 1 that he brought Harith to the Defense Department's attention.
He declined to respond to multiple efforts to contact him this week
after Knight Ridder learned new details of the Harith case.
The classified Pentagon report said that on Feb. 11, 2002,
Woolsey telephoned Wells, who at that time oversaw the Defense
Intelligence Agency, with word that the INC had produced Harith.
Wells then informed the DIA through an "executive referral" how to
contact Harith through the INC's headquarters in London.
Wells confirmed details of the report in an e-mail to Knight
Ridder.
"I discussed the issue of an individual with information on Iraq
weapons of mass destruction with intelligence community members," he
said. "They said they would follow up. I never met with any member
of the INC."
Wells said he didn't know that the DIA, the CIA and the State
Department had warned policymakers for years that they considered
the INC's information unreliable.
"I was aware that sources always need to be vetted and this
instance would be no different," he said. "This was not a big deal.
It was simply a tip that needed to get to folks working the issue."
According to the Pentagon report, two DIA officers met with
Chalabi later that day, and he arranged for them to interview
Harith.
Harith reportedly claimed that he was a major in Saddam's
intelligence service attached to a unit involved in concealing
banned weapons.
In a March 2002 interview with CBS News' "60 Minutes," Harith
claimed that he'd purchased seven Renault refrigerated trucks for
conversion into biological warfare laboratories. In a videotaped
interview with INC officials, reported two weeks later by the Sunday
Times of London, he said the vehicles were disguised as milk and
yogurt trucks.
Harith wasn't identified in either instance, but a senior U.S.
official confirmed that he was the same man.
Woolsey was among the most outspoken advocates outside of
government for invading Iraq.
In television appearances and in articles, he suggested that
Saddam's Iraq was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and
the subsequent anthrax poisonings. He has also been critical of the
CIA's intelligence-gathering on Iraq.
"We can work a lot more closely with Iraqi defectors. The Defense
Department has been willing to do that," he said in a September 2002
television appearance. "The State Department and the CIA have been
somewhat reluctant."
On July 1, Woolsey said his only role as an intermediary occurred
shortly before the invasion of Iraq, when he heard about "an urgent
threat" by Iraq to U.S. naval forces in the Middle East. "I called a
military officer" and passed on the information, he said.
A former senior U.S. government official confirmed that Woolsey
called Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, then the DIA director, just
before the war. Woolsey went to Wilson's house that evening, and the
DIA chief put him in touch by secure phone with a DIA Iraq analyst,
said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The official said he felt that Woolsey was sincerely concerned
and trying to get the information to the U.S. government in a
legitimate way.
He said he also recalled "a referral or two" from Woolsey
regarding defectors.
As for sources introduced via executive referrals, "If anything,
our position was to give them more, not less, scrutiny," he said.
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